Summary

This chapter presented readers with the fundamental analysis tools that run throughout the book. As with any complex topic, storage networking has many possible interpretations. It's important to find a stable analysis method that can be used for a wide breadth of products and network designs.

The three functional areas of connecting, storing, and filing can be ascribed to any element of a storage network. It is a powerful analysis, because there is very little overlap between them, which limits confusion to a great extent. It can even be used to clarify the long-standing confusion regarding NAS and SAN.

Another major tool introduced in this chapter was the term storage address space as a generalization of all sorts of storage receptacles, including disk drives, disk partitions, disk volumes, virtual disk, exported storage, and LUNs. Using this term simplifies discussions of storage processes immensely without obscuring the nature of how storage works. A storage address space is the element that a filing system uses and manages.

There is a great deal of flexibility in how storage networks can be constructed. The architectural diagrams at the end of the chapter are graphical depictions of the fundamental approaches that can be used. It is hoped that these diagrams will speak volumes to readers who think visually.